To Play the Fool (2 page)

"It'll pass for one."

"Life has not been funny, Al."

"No," he agreed. "No. How is Lee?"

"She's doing really well. She finally found a wheelchair
that's comfortable, and the new physical therapist seems good.
She wants to try Lee in a walker in a week or so. Don't mention
it, though, if you talk to Lee. She'll want to do it then and
there."

"I'll remember."

"Did I tell you she's started seeing clients again?"

"No! Now, that is good news."

"Only two of them, and on different days, but it gives her a
feeling of real life. It's made a hell of a difference."

"I can imagine. Do you think she'd like a visitor?"

"She always loves to see you, Al."

"I got the impression it tired her out."

"Tires her for that day, cheers her up for the next two. A
good trade. Just call before you go,- she doesn't deal too well
with surprises."

"I'll call. Tomorrow, if I can swing it. I'll take her some flowers."

"Don't do that. Lee hates cut flowers."

"I know. It'll give us something to argue about."

"So thoughtful, Al."

"That's me."

"Well," said Kate, pulling her notebook and pen from a jacket pocket, "back to work."

"Martinelli?" She stopped and turned to look at her partner. "It's good to have you back."

Kate ducked her head in acknowledgment and walked quickly away.

Al Hawkin watched her walk toward the motley congregation of
homeless, her spine straight and her attitude as quietly self-contained
as ever, and found himself wondering why the hell she had come back.

The last months must have seared themselves straight down into the
bones of her mind, he reflected, but aside from the increased wariness
in her already-wary eyes, she did not show it. Oh, yes--and the
white-eyed terror with which she regarded the three newspaper reporters
who slouched behind the police tapes.

Last spring the media had seized her with sheer delight, a genuine
San Francisco lesbian, a policewoman, whose lover had been shot and
left dramatically near death by a sociopath who was out to destroy the
world-famous artist Eva Vaughn-- the combination of high culture,
pathos, and titillation were irresistible, even for serious news media.
For a couple of weeks, Kate's squarish face and haunted dark eyes
looked out from the pages of supermarket scandal sheets and glossy
weekly news journals, and ABC did a half-hour program on homosexuality
in the police force.

And while this jamboree was going on, while the hate mail was
pouring in and the Hall of Justice switchboard was completely jammed,
Kate lived at the hospital, where her lover teetered on the edge of
death. It was six weeks before Kate knew Lee would live,- another six
weeks passed before the doctors voiced a faint hope that she might
regain partial sensation and a degree of control below the waist.

At this juncture Hawkin had done something that still gave him cold
sweats of guilt when he thought about it: Guided by an honest belief
that work would be the best therapy for Kate, he had taken ruthless
advantage of her newfound optimism and yanked her back onto the force,
into their partnership, and straight into the unparalleled disaster of
the Raven Morningstar murder case. And of course, when the case blew up
in blood and scandal back in August, the media had been ecstatic to
find Kate right in the middle. That she was one of the few out of the
cast of dramatic personae not culpable for any fault greater than a
lack of precognition mattered not. She was their prize, their Inspector
Casey, and she bled publicly for the nation's entertainment.

Why she had not resigned after the Morningstar case, Hawkin could
not understand. She hadn't put her gun inside her mouth because
Lee needed her,- she hadn't had a serious mental breakdown for
the same reason. Instead, she had clawed herself into place behind a
desk and endured five months of paper shuffling and that special hatred
and harassment that a quasimilitary organization reserves for one of
their own who has exposed the weakness of the whole. Two weeks ago,
pale but calm, she had appeared at Hawkin's desk and informed him
that if he still wanted her as his partner, she was available.

He held an enormous respect for this young woman, a feeling he
firmly kept from her, and just as firmly demonstrated before others in
the department.

However, he still didn't know why the hell she had come back.

At four o'clock that afternoon, across town at the Hall of
Justice, the question had not been answered so much as submerged
beneath the complexities of the case.

"So," Hawkin stretched out in his chair and tried to rub
the tiredness from the back of his neck. The coffee hadn't helped
much. "Have you managed to make any sense of this mess?" He
might have been referring to the case in general, or to the unruly
drift of papers covering the desk's surface, which now included
roughly transcribed interviews, printouts of arrest records for the
people involved, as well as the records from the earlier dog incident.
This last report had been couched in phrases that made clear what the
two investigating officers had thought of their odd case, wandering as
it did between a recognition of its absurdity and downright sarcasm at
the waste of their time. The recorded interview with the dog's
owner had been perfunctory and less than helpful, and Hawkin's
interview with the officer involved had stopped short of scathing only
because he knew that his own reaction would have been much the same as
the younger man's.

"A bit, but we have to find this man Erasmus. He organized the
cremation of the dog last month, though everyone was quite
clear--those who were clear, that is, if you know what I
mean--that he wasn't here this time. They seem to have
decided that what was good enough for the dog was good enough for the
dog's owner. Crime Scene's going back tonight to check the
whole area with Luminol, but it looks like one patch of blood that bled
slowly and stopped with death rather than blood pouring out from, say,
a knife wound. Could have been shot, but Luis, one of the men who found
him, said his head looked bashed. And of course we know what happened
to every loose stick in the whole damned park. Sorry? Oh, yes,
I'll have another cup, thanks.

"Where was I?" Kate thumbed through her notes a moment.
"Okay, who found the body. Harry Radovich and Luis Ortiz both
claim they saw him first, but they were together, and their stories
mesh--though Harry's is a little clearer in the details.
They saw his kit abandoned behind a bench at about six p.m., went
looking for him, and found him. You saw the place, about three hundred
yards from where they tried to burn him this morning. At first they
thought he was asleep, lying facedown, slightly tilted onto his right
side, under that tree with the branches that touch the ground. They
were worried, seeing him lying on the ground just in his clothes, and
thought he might be sick, this flu that's going around. So they
shook his legs, got no response, pushed their way in and turned him on
his back. There was dried blood covering the right side of his head and
face, his eyeballs were slightly sunken and dry-looking, the corneas
cloudy, his facial skin dark with no blanching under pressure, and he
was getting pretty stiff in his upper body."

"A couple of drunks told you all that?" asked Hawkin,
turning from the coffee machine to look at her in astonishment.

"Luis was a medic in Vietnam for three years,- he knows what a dead body looks like."

"So you think his judgment's good on this?"

"Large grain of salt, but he swears he didn't get truly
smashed until after finding the body, and he seems shaky now but sober.
His testimony is worth keeping in mind, that's all, until we hear
the postmortem results."

"Which probably won't tell us much about time of death unless the stomach contents are good."

"Any idea when they'll do the postmortem?"

"First thing in the morning."

"Good," she said evenly, as if talking about the arrival
of a tidy packet of information instead of the participation in an
ordeal of burned flesh and the smell of power saws cutting through bone.

"Meanwhile, though," he said, "what are we talking
here? Middle-aged alcoholic on a night just above freezing, how many
hours to rigor?"

"John didn't drink. They all agree on that. Or use drugs."

"Okay. So assuming they recognize liver mortis when they see
it, which I doubt, that'd put it, oh, say some time before noon
on Tuesday morning. Just as a guideline to get us started."

"I agree, though I'd lean to the later end of that. His body looked on the thin side."

As Hawkin had studiously avoided any close examination of the remains, he couldn't argue.

"Any of them have a last name for him, any ID?" he asked.

"Nope. They just knew him as John."

"Theophilus's owner."

"Who?"

"The dog. Means 'one who loves God," I think."

"What is this, a mission to the homeless? Lover of God and Brother Erasmus. Batty names." Kate snorted.

"Erasmus was a philosopher, wasn't he? Wrote
The Praise of Folly.
Seventeenth century? Sixteenth?"

"I'll take your word for it. Anyway, this Erasmus is
across the Bay somewhere, Berkeley or Oakland, not due back until
Sunday, and they were afraid the body would smell, so they didn't
wait for him to get back. Just hauled in every scrap of wood they could
find, shoved his body on, added a few bottles of various flammable
liquids, and lighted it. With prayers, read by Wilhemena and one of the
men. Rigor mortis may have been beginning to wear off, by the way, at
six this morning. His head was floppy when they moved him onto the
woodpile."

"Right. Let's hang on to Harry, Luis, and Wilhemena, at
least until we get the postmortem report to give us a cause of death.
Charge them with improper disposal of a body, interfering with an
investigation, whatever you like. The rest of them can go. And we might
as well go, too. There's not much more we can do until the
results come in, except find the good Brother Erasmus. You want to do
that?"

"Tonight?"

"Tomorrow. I'll take the postmortem."

How interesting, Hawkin thought. I've only worked with
Martinelli for a total of a few weeks, and most of that was months ago,
but I can still read her face. She's trying to decide if she
should insist on taking the shit job, to prove herself capable. No,
can't quite do it. Can't quite admit she's relieved
that I took it, either.

Kate was still wrestling with gratitude when Hawkin's phone rang.

"Hawkin," he said, and listened for a minute. "I
am." Another longish pause, then: "Sure, bring her
up." He hung up and looked at Kate. "There's a
homeless woman downstairs, came in with information on the
cremation."

Water his sister, pure and clean and inviolate.

The woman who entered a few minutes later wasn't quite what
Kate had expected. She was quite tidy, for one thing, her graying hair
gathered into a snug bun at the nape of her neck,- her eyes darted
nervously about, but they were clear, and her spine was straight. She
wore the inevitable eclectic jumble, long skirt with trouser cuffs
underneath, blouse, vest, knitted shawl, and rings on five fingers, but
she wrapped her clothes around her with dignity and sat without
hesitation in the chair Hawkin indicated. Kate turned another chair
around to the desk and took out her pen. Hawkin looked down at the
paper he'd just been given and then up at her, a smile of
singular sweetness on his rugged face.

"Your name is Beatrice?" he asked, giving the name two syllables.

"Beatrice," she corrected, giving it the Italian four.

"Any last name?"

"Not for many years."

"What was it then?"

"The men downstairs asked me that, too."

"And you didn't give it to them."

"I was not impressed by the manners of your police department."

"I apologize for them. Their youth does not excuse them."

She studied him thoughtfully.

"Forgive them,- for they know not what they do. That's what Brother Erasmus would say, I suppose."

"Who is this Brother Erasmus?" he asked her.

"Jankowski."

"Erasmus Jankowski?" Hawkin said, polite but amazed.

"No! I hardly know the man," Beatrice protested. Kate
rested her elbow on the desk and pinched the bridge of her nose for a
moment. "Well, no, I admit I do know him, as well as anyone you
brought in this morning, which isn't saying much."

"It's your last name, then? Beatrice Jankowski?"

"You can see why I gave up the last part."

"Oh, I don't know," said Hawkin, rising to gallantry. "It has a certain ring to it."

"Like a funeral toll," she said expressively. Hawkin abandoned his flirtation.

"What do you know about what happened in Golden Gate Park this morning, Miss--is it Miss Jankowski?"

"Call me Beatrice. I told them they were imbeciles, but even
men who fry their brains on cheap wine don't listen to
women."

"You tried to dissuade them... from the cremation."

"There is a difference between a man and a dog, after all."

"You were there when the dog was cremated--what was it, three or four weeks ago?" Hawkin asked.

"That had a certain beauty," Beatrice said wistfully.
"It was appropriate. It was also--well, perhaps not strictly
legal, but hardly criminal. Wouldn't you agree?" she asked,
and blinked her eyes gently at Al Hawkin. He avoided the question.

"Did you know the dead man?"

"I knew the dog, quite well."

"And the man?"

"Oh dear. He was..." For the first time Beatrice
Jankowski looked uncomfortable. "You don't really want to
know about him."

"I do, you know."

She met his eyes briefly, looked down at her strong fingers with
their swollen knuckles, twisting and turning one ring after another,
and sighed.